A week ago I had a dream. All I remember from the dream is some guy saying, "Being able to see the future is a curse. The voice of a god is speaking right into my brain, telling me things that no living man has the right to know. This is no gift, this is insanity."

I think this is a rather neat thing for someone to say, and I'm thinking of doing a run where the players have to protect a man who can see into the future from corp "talent acquisition" squads.

The problem is, I'm having trouble thinking up things for this man to say and do. I'd like for the revelations to be interesting and potentially useful, but I'd rather not have to pull strings to force them to come true. So far the only thing I have home come up with is: "That man there, he's watching us. *sigh* His wife is going to be devastated." and the classic: "We should leave, NOW!" just before someone bursts through the front door.

So, can anyone help me out?

You mean you watched Minority Report while half asleep?
(Same concept)
if you haven't. I suggest you do. might give you some ideas.

Make him a psionic magician.
They are really rare.

He could even be more rare by having the ability for his Thought Forms reach out into the "oceans" (as they are described in SR3 as) of mana in a different way.
Instead of assensing to see connections to things and people reagrding things that have happened, he can see the oceans of mana's movements and assense that motion to see the future.

Somewhat like seeing a a wave comming and knowing that it will hit the beach rather than knowing where it came from.

As for sayings:

"When the time comes...forgive me."

"The past is a collection of our great moments and great atrosities. The future...carries such a weight that history may not be able to contain it."

"If you want to know what tomorrow brings...take another breath, another step and follow the path to meet me there."

"Presently I am here in tomorrow."

"Then is not too far from now..."

"We will see him again"

"Don't do that."

Hope some of that helps...

Very good diviner. High level initiate with divination.

Just follow the idea of that one Christopher Walken skit on an old SNL episode. He could see into the near future by touching someone... but only in regards to minor, meaningless things.

<shakes someone's hand then jerks and freezes> "You... will be arriving at the office early tomorrow morning... and you will sit at your desk after getting a really hot cup of coffee... you'll see a file on your desk... when you pick it up, all the papers will fall out because someone forgot to use a paper clip." <end of premonition> "DON'T YOU GET IT, MAN?! The papers are going to fall onto the floor! For the love of God, be careful!"

I like the idea of him being silent almost all the time, saying almost nothing because he knows it will make no difference. The biggest clues will be simple, small gestures. For example, when they walk past a bar he stops suddenly and before the characters can respond a body flies through the window, after which he continues walking, only shrugging if asked what made him stop. Similarly, he could be sitting at a table and then get up and walk over to a certain spot, all while seemingly concentrating on this little blank book he carries around. The next moment bullet holes have riddled where he was sitting.

I suggest biblical quotes for his rare statements.

Make him a Cassandra.

Thanks everyone.

The dream came, I think, from Exalted. I was reading the main book around that time.

I'm not concerned with how it is that he sees the future. I'd rather view it as a force of nature that he is struggling against. Not something he has any control over.

Kanada Ten's could work. Build a sense of mystery, toss out some omonius literary quotes. I think I could pull it off without any problems.

Doctor Funkenstein's idea sounds like fun. A small nervious man, pulling strange ideas out of thin air that end up being true. It'll be a pain coming up with cleaver things to say, but if I pull it off I think it'd be a real blast.

If they keep bugging him for predictions

"Okay... you want to know the future.... you *points* YOU *points* AND YOU! *points* are all GOING TO DIE *looks at watch* sometime between now and July 18th 3125!"

What matters most is what he sees and how he feels about his powers. The more he sees and the less he can change the more powerfless he will feel. However, if he can see just enough he may feel an obligation to share his knowledge to the benefit of others. That, and he'd have probably played the lottery at least once.

Presumably he doens't see all the future, and he may have no control over which snippets he gets - that would make him very valuable to a corporation while making his "gift" pretty useless from his perspective. The other option is to keep the horizon for most of his visions pretty long - corps will care about events that will happen in a few year's time, but the runners won't be as heavily influenced.

What if he's been writing these predicitons down, but the crop has only stumbled across them because a couple of things he predicted years ago just happened.

Have his ability make him tell people things they don't want to hear - but he can't shut up about it. He tells people that they're going to die, or that the star is going to leave their favourite team, or that his children will grow to hate him - nothing you can gamble on, but the kind of stuff that will start fights.

Reliable useful predictions are not possible in a game world. You have randomness the dice and more so in the PCs actions.

You also need a reason why he bothered to get protection.

One option, make his premonitions probable futures. And have him hire the party to protect him for 3 days. On the 2nd day and every day thereafter he will extend the contract 1 day.

If pressed he will say he has had a premonition of himself lying dead with a newspaper the day before the contract was supposed to expire with his murderer standing over him unharmed and nobody else around. Put enough information in the premonitions that a investigation can find out who killed him and why so they can stop it from happening the day after the runner guards leave. If they decide to ride this gravy train forever (as they well might) give it a weak and then have him worry about running out of money.

A common theme in presence is the inability to see ones own death.

The dune books also had an interesting take on presence I well recommend reading the entire seres but you may well not have time before your game. The dune movies tend to gloss over the presence and end before the time of the blind prophet and he was the one that had it best explained.

Edward

Dune is a long read, but this pretty much sums up the concepts.

http://www.dunenovels.com/news/genesis.html

Or the episode of the X-Files with Peter Boyle, who said to David Duchovony, "How to do you feel about autoerotic asyphixiation?"

Thats the problem with prophecy. If you can see into the future as if it is predetermined, the knowledge gives you the choice. Noah Wiley brought this up in Donnie Darko, but I think it was covered in uh... every book or movie about time travel ever. Like The Dead Zone, where Walken's character could stop Martin Sheen from becoming president by shooting or discrediting him (even though it apparently didn't work, as fans of the West Wing know).

The main reason predicitions are difficult to fulfill in games is that players will instinctively do everything in their power to screw them up.

Try telling that to the players.

Gah, I hate the enigmatic bible spouters. So boring.

You need to define how well he can see the future, and then you can extrapolate from there. I would have him have a general feel for things, with the occasional clear flash. At one point, he is very insistant that the PCs follow a certain course of actions, even invoking 'I can see the future, take my word on this,' which leads them into a trap, a big firefight, something nasty. When the PC get a chance to demand, 'WTF? If you knew that was coming, why did you lead us into it?" He can answer. "Trust me, the alternative was even worse."

Be creative, but don't act too clever for your own good. Another good way to play it is that his power gives him vague feelings about sequences of events (I feel that pantsing Harlequinn will... lead to something very very bad). I'd be inclined to play him a bit as an everyman trying to cope with something way beyond his ken, which might lead to a breakdown if pcs keep pestering him about the future. "You're all going to die! Sometime!"

Another thing you can do is to get the PCs activley involved in 'the future'.

The Dead Zone is a fine example, the prophet guys sees that Martin Sheen's character will be elected President and start WW3, he wants the PCs to stop him.

If the guy can see several 'alternative' futures then you can have the PCs try to choose which future actually happens. i.e. if x and y and z happen, it will be good, if a, b, and c happen it will be bad. If you are being especially mean, you can have the good future require x, y, and z while the bad one needs x, y, and a. Will the PCs want to take the chance?

Can you say plot hook? Shockwave has got it perfect. Might also have him drop a hint when hes reading a news paper about a stock value that will either drop hard or rise sharp. Bonuses are good.
I think its a great concept, hope it works out well.

Another argument against an imutable future is that if I "predict" something that I will then force to happen, it robs the pcs of control. If where they end up isn't a function of the choices they make, why bother? Giving players non-option options (choices that don't change anything) just cheeses them off. I've played in games that were so heavily scripted to what the gm wanted to happen that nothing the group did mattered. If its going to go like that, why even bother to show up? The gm can call me later and tell me what happened.

Which is more of argument against meta-gaming than prophecy or time travel, but its all good.

"What'll really bake your noodle later on is, Would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"

What is why I perfer the "All roads lead to Rome" aproach to the immutable future. That no matter what the players do it will end the same way, but untill then their choices are limited only by their imagination. When I say so vauge that the plaers can't work against it I mean so vauge that it could fit any circumstance that the players create for themselves.

THE NPC doesn't have to tell the players his prediction anyway, which wuld make it meaningless to them but the results would be the same.

But when the predictions are so vague they can fit any circumstance, you're moving away from a guy who can see into the future to a guy who writes fortune cookies.

There was a good episode of the Twilight Zone (one of the hour long episodes, which aren't my favorite) about a guy who had become fed up with the modern world and invented a time machine. He went back and tried to prevent the Second World War, first by killing Hitler (he failed), and again by warning the Japanese of the A-Bomb (no one believed him). He tried to prevent the Titanic from sinking, but he was similarly unsuccessful. So he decided to go back before the modern age and live out his life in post-Civil War America, believing it to be a less chaotic and violent time (he was a scientist, and not a history major, after all).

Living back then, he realized people were just as violent and short-sighted as they were in his time. Then, during an attempt to prevent the assassination of President Garfield, he accidentally killed President Garfield (any chance this guy was a shadowrunner?). As I said, it was a good episode, but it suffers from being boiled down to a synopsis.

But this type of mechanic, that even with time travel (or prophecy) you can't change anything because its already happened works better in ficiton than in role-playing because in role-playing, you don't have as much control. As a gm, while you're trying to make a prophecy and fulfill it, you have 3-6 other people at the table trying to screw you up, whether they mean to or not.

So you have to keep it vague and open to interpretation, but if someone who made those kind of predicitions was going to be valuable to a megacorp, then Microsoft would be hunting Miss Cleo down even as we speak.

I think I'm going with Doctor Funkenstein's idea. Using a handful of minor predictions that I can resolve through the GM's ability to describe the world. This way I could use specific predictions that are (I hope) interesting while allowing the players to still play the game. I just have to careful not to abuse this and break the suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps one or two 'medium' predictions to show he can be useful. Perhaps some hints before combat or guiding the rigger during a car chase. Shockwave_IIc's suggesting is good, I think I'm going to end with him saying something like that to one of the PCs.

Let us know how it turns out